PingPerfect Review 2020

Reviewed byJacob Tuwiner

PingPerfect

Game Servers

Not only do they have great servers and an awesome control panel, they also have an amazing support team. Their responsiveness and helpfulness absolutely blew me away, especially when compared to the other companies on this list.

Their servers are fast, support is on point, and the value is there for most people. However, there were still a few things I didn’t like about PingPerfect, which we’ll get to in the review.

Summary

In short, PingPerfect is a great host for those who want to run a small to medium sized server on a small budget.

They have a wide range of supported games, and tremendous support staff.

However, their servers do get a bit pricey as you scale to larger slot counts.

What We’re Looking For

There are four main criteria I look at when reviewing a game hosting company like PingPerfect:

1. Performance: First and foremost, the server needs to be fast. It’s the whole reason we’re buying dedicated hosting, so we ought to get our money’s worth.

2. Control Panel: The control panel should be easy-to-use and reliable. Adding mods, plugins, etc. shouldn’t be a chore.

3. Support: Even expert server owners will run into trouble at some point, not to mention first timers. A hosting company’s support team is one of the most important things to consider before forking over your money.

4. Value: Lastly, the price you’re paying for the above three aspects should be reasonable. Similarly to building a gaming PC, it’s important to get the most bang for your gaming buck.

About PingPerfect

PingPerfect is run by a team of gamers, network technicians and programmers, which means they’re more than capable of helping you out in a pinch, not to mention operating high-performance servers.

Based in East Yorkshire, England, PingPerfect has more than 20 locations all around the world, ensuring stellar performance regardless of where you live.

PingPerfect also offers free web hosting to all of their game server customers, something unique to their company as far as I know. This generous offer sets them apart from their competition, once again going above and beyond the call of duty. With their free website hosting, you can make a site to promote your server, helping it grow and even monetizing it down the line.

Best of all, PingPerfect stands behind their product. They have a 48 hour money back guarantee, meaning if you don’t like your game server for whatever reason, they’ll refund you immediately, no questions asked.

And if you’re the type who likes a free trial instead, they can hook you up with a free 48 hour trial as well. A money back guarantee is one thing, but offering their service free of charge is another.

Their stellar support, long company history, terrific performance and wide variety of games speak for themselves. PingPerfect is one of the best hosting companies in the industry.

Considering they have locations spanning six different continents, odds are you’ll have low ping regardless of your location, hence the name PingPERFECT!

Server Types

PingPerfect is primarily a game hosting company, but they offer other hosting services as well, including web services, VPS/VDS, and voice servers. They offer free 1GB web server hosting with any server purchase over ten Euros, which is pretty awesome.

Since I only tested their game servers, I’m going to steer clear of the VPS/voice servers in this review, as I cannot attest to their quality. But if they’re anything like their game servers, I’d highly recommend them as well.

PingPerfect Games

PingPerfect supports more than 130 games, all with instant server deployment, meaning your server will be up and running within seconds after paying.

Of course, the server will be entirely vanilla, so if you want to install plugins, change the map, make yourself admin, etc. it’s going to need configuration. But that’s easy to do - the point is, PingPerfect supports a crap load of games!

Some of their popular titles include Rust, Terraria, ARK: Survival Evolved, 7 Days to Die, Space Engineers, DayZ Standalone, Minecraft, Unturned, The Isle, and more.

PingPerfect Server Performance

Server performance is one of the most important aspects of the hosting provider you choose. Nobody likes to lag - it’s probably one of the most annoying things about gaming.

In fact, stellar performance is one of the main reasons why you’re paying for server hosting in the first place, so it ought to live up to your expectations.

Game servers require a lot of performance, especially in open world environments with lots of players. Larger worlds require more memory, and higher player counts will tax the server even further.

That’s why you can host a few friends on a dedicated rust server, for example, but trying to host more than 10-15 people will quickly turn into a nightmare.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an army of people to test PingPerfect’s server performance at scale, but I had nine of my friends hop on Rust to test their 50 slot server with the base performance configurations.

The server was buttery smooth even with ten of us on at once. Although, I can’t say what would happen to performance as the server capacity neared 100%.

What I can say, however, is my friends and I had incredibly low ping for the entirety of our 20 hours on the server, never going above 15ms. The server never went down, and I didn’t experience any lag.

Overall, I was quite pleased with its performance.

PingPerfect Control Panel

PingPerfect uses a custom variant of TCAdmin, a battle tested control panel that’s flexible, functional, and reliable. The control panel does have somewhat of a learning curve for newbies, but it’s not too bad.

It’s one of the oldest control panels on the market, but thanks to PingPerfect’s custom design, it looks more modern and is easier on the eyes than the original version.

Although it may look similar to other control panels on the outside, their TCA implementation has a ton of scripts you cannot see that make everything easier for the customer.

For example, you can upgrade to a beta version of the game if you want, one click installs of Umod (oxide), a reset world button, an Rcon details button, etc.

Either way, I can’t complain about PingPerfect’s control panel. It allows you to start, stop, and even reinstall your game server with ease. TCAdmin is available on any platform with a standard web browser, and PingPerfects is apparently working on a custom android/IOS panel so you can easily manage your server on the go.

PingPerfect’s control panel also has links to helpful resources like Tebex, where you can monetize your server, and their knowledgebase, which has a plethora of helpful information.

PingPerfect Knowledgebase

PingPerfect has an impressive knowledge base with more than 600 tips, tricks, and step-by-step tutorials that’ll help you get your server up and running. You can access their knowledge base via your game panel, their main website, or by searching for a solution in Google, adding “PingPerfect” to the end.

Nine times out of ten, Google will return a knowledge base tutorial, or a helpful forum thread.

In their categories tab, you’ll see nearly 600 individual articles in the game servers section, and significantly less covering other aspects of the site, and none covering their dedicated servers. It seems like their main customer base needs help with game servers, so it’s easy to understand why they’ve focused on that area of the knowledgebase.

PingPerfect told me they update their knowledgebase as they get questions from their customers, meaning it covers all of the most common questions they receive.

It also looks like they have a plethora of articles for their popular games like Rust and ARK, but significantly less for less popular games like Insurgency Sandstorm.

Again, having more resources for games with higher demand makes sense. But if you’re one of the few who wants to play a less popular game, you’ll have less resources at your disposal.

I used PingPerfect to set up a Rust server during my tests, and I used their knowledgebase to install Rust Oxide and the Gather Manager plugin, one of the most popular plugins in the game.

I found their tutorial about making yourself admin helpful and clear. I can’t speak to the thoroughness of their entire knowledgebase, but generally speaking, it’s pretty good.

Besides, if you can’t figure out what’s going wrong or need some extra help for any reason whatsoever, PingPerfect’s support has your back (more on that below).

PingPerfect Support

Should you need any help with literally anything, PingPerfect’s support team will come to the rescue in ten minutes or less.

Seriously, those guys are fast.

Not only did they respond to my support ticket within ten minutes, they helped me fix the problem from start to finish and followed up to make sure everything was working properly.

What they lack in their knowledgebase is easily made up for by their stellar support team, and then some.

They are gamers themselves, not to mention trained professionals, so they know first-hand what you’re going through and can help you out in a pinch.

Their experience in tandem with their insanely fast response time and willingness to help out equates to one of the best game server support teams around.

But don’t take my word for it - you can see hundreds of others praising them on TrustPilot as well.

Overall, PingPerfect’s support team gets an A+ from me.

Pricing

Not only does PingPerfect offer high performance servers with outstanding support for their wide array of supported games, they do it for a competitively low price.

Different games have their own prices per slot, but compared to their competitors, PingPerfect’s prices are generally lower across the board.

Take 7 Days to Die, for example. This table shows what PingPerfect’s base price is for a 14 slot server, compared to four of their competitors:

Logo

Company

Base Price

PingPerfect

$0.99/slot

Gameserverkings

$0.99/slot

Host Havoc

$1.00/slot

As you can see, PingPerfect offers the cheapest price of all the companies, but keep in mind that’s just the base price. If you add PingPerfect branding to your server, the price will lower even further.

PingPerfect also offers a discount for longer commitments. 5% discount for quarterly, 10% discount for semi-annually, and 15% discount for annual payments.

However, it can also increase in price - like most hosting companies, you can pay for additional performance add ons, like additional memory and CPU priority. Those addons probably aren’t necessary for most beginner server owners, though, and can always be added later.

Unlike Host Havoc, which offers bulk discounts (the more slots you pay for, the cheaper each slot becomes) PingPerfect’s pricing is static. This means their servers are cheap for small servers, but can become expensive as you scale.

For example, a 7 Days to Die server costs $11.88 minimum with PingPerfect, which comes out to $0.99 per slot, with a 12 slot minimum. Host Havoc charges $1/slot, which is nearly identical to PingPerfect, but Host Havoc has a 14 slot minimum, so their base price is $14/month.

If you’re only going to host a small server for you and maybe a few friends, PingPerfect is the better option.

Conversely, if you’re going to run a large server or plan on scaling quickly, Host Havoc is the best option (strictly in terms of price). Host Havoc offers a maximum of 40 slots for 7 Days to Die, and they only charge $0.59/slot, coming out to $23.75/month.

PingPerfect, on the other hand, only has a maximum of 32 slots, and they still cost $0.99 per slot. Host Havoc not only offers more slots in total, you can also get them for less.

Let’s compare them using the same slot count. Here is a table showing the same companies pricing for a 32 slot 7 Days to Die Server:

Logo

Company

Base Price

PingPerfect

$0.99/slot

Gameserverkings

$0.99/slot

Host Havoc

$0.65/slot

Not all of their pricing is static, however - some games have bulk pricing discounts, on top of the quarterly or yearly commitment discounts.

In summary, PingPerfect’s pricing is fair, and is especially good for small server owners, but may get pricey as you grow. Overall, they’re a great value for the money and probably underpriced, if anything.

What I Liked

First and foremost, it’s hard to compete with PingPerfect’s vast array of games. They’re one of the best hosting companies on the market in terms of game support.

While most people playing popular games have a plethora of hosting companies to choose from, those who want to host a server on a less popular game will have less options.

PingPerfect also has outstanding customer service and support. First of all, they gave me a free trial of their server for this review, which was granted within 10 minutes of asking for it.

But on top of that, they were also fast to answer my questions, often within five minutes, and never more than 20 minutes after submitting a support ticket.

Support is one of the most important aspects of a hosting company - no matter how great their servers are or how experienced you are with hosting, you’re bound to run into trouble eventually. That’s when a stellar support team shines.

The support team can make or break a hosting company - PingPerfect clearly puts the customer first, and aims to be there every step of the way.

Their servers also seem to have great performance. I didn’t have the opportunity to stress test my server, but after hours and hours of gameplay with friends, I didn’t have any issues. Others with larger servers have told me they love the performance too.

PingPerfect is also a great hosting company for those on a budget who want to run a small server. They’re less competitive when you rent a high slot count server, but overall they’re still fairly priced.

Lastly, their control panel is pretty standard, but that’s not a bad thing - in fact, I quite like how easy it is to use. Its simple design is clean and intuitive.

What I Didn’t Like

PingPerfect’s knowledgebase has a lot of useful information, but some of the tutorials could be a bit more in-depth for beginners. Images, and more specific instructions would make a tremendous difference.

I know it’s hard to do that for more than 600 tutorials, but at least starting with the most common questions would probably help their users and support team a lot.

I’d also prefer tiered pricing that rewards users to rent larger servers. Their pricing structure is great for small to medium sized servers, but there is no incentive to buy more slots than what is absolutely necessary.

The Final Word

PingPerfect is a great hosting company, but everyone has different needs. If you’re looking to get started hosting a game server on a tight budget, PingPerfect is a great choice.

Their wide variety of supported titles, great performance, simple control panel, low price (for small servers) and terrific support make them a great all rounder for newbies who might need some extra help.

However, more advanced server owners who want to host a large server may want to look elsewhere, as PingPerfect servers can get a bit pricey with higher slot counts, not to mention the performance addons you’ll likely need, which will further increase your monthly bill.